It made his life a little more complicated than other men’s, he was prepared to concede that, or perhaps differently complicated — after all, plenty of men had secret indulgences; but whether complicated or not, it felt normal to him. In his younger years, he’d cruised with bravado; he’d had fun, and it certainly added a bit of sparkle to an otherwise workaday existence. Since meeting Winston, his life had been far more sedate with only the occasional opportunistic adventure. He wasn’t using age to deflect from other issues. He was fifty-seven, he was ageing, and that made a difference.

‘So many of my generation won’t get to your age,’ Winston now said.

The head on his shoulder suddenly felt leaden. Winston was obsessed with AIDS, he couldn’t leave the topic alone. AIDS intruded on all their Thursdays and Saturdays. AIDS was spoiling their time together.

‘Can’t you forget the AIDS business for just a couple of hours?’ Leonard said. He didn’t bother to conceal his irritation.

Winston pulled himself up and sat cross-legged on the bed. His skin was smooth and hairless, his body boyishly slender. An ephebe — the word popped into Leonard’s mind from some long-ago reading. But while Winston might look like a boy, he wasn’t sounding like one.

‘I hate the way you refer to “the AIDS business”, Leo. It’s a disease. And it’s killing men like us.’

Leonard, too, sat up. He pulled on a shirt, no need to advertise his age, and tried to find a way out of the conversation he knew was about to happen. He and Winston had argued about the AIDS business dozens of times, and on each occasion he had tried to placate Winston with the facts: the men who were dying of AIDS were active homosexuals, deeply embedded within a gay sub-culture. He and Winston were not. Winston only had sex with Leonard, or at least that was what he said, although Leonard had wondered about his regular visits to the Richmond pool; but whatever he did he would do it safely. As for himself, he was married, and should he have a casual encounter these days, it was always safe.

Winston was so terrified of AIDS he’d attended an information session run by a gay men’s health group. Leonard had refused to go. ‘I’m not like them,’ he’d said. Winston returned with information about services and support groups; he also brought news of an HIV test newly available to those at risk.

‘We’re all scared,’ he said now, drawing the sheet around him. He recited a litany of pain, as if Leonard had not heard it all before: diarrhoea, a raft of opportunistic infections, rare cancers, ugly skin lesions, weight loss, muscle wasting — ‘Some of these men look like inmates of Changi’ — organ failure, dementia, blindness.

‘It’s a punishing disease, Leo,’ he said, with an emphasis on ‘punishing’.